Astronauts are not the only ones earning wings on the International Space Station. Butterflies emerged aboard the station recently, to the delight of science students across the country. That experiment and studies of bacteria that advance research about food poisoning and infections are the subjects of live NASA TV satellite interview opportunities from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. CST on Friday, Dec. 18.

International Space Station Program Scientist Julie Robinson will be available for interviews along with Dr. Nancy Moreno, a principal investigator of the Painted Lady butterfly education activities. Moreno is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine who is conducting the butterfly research with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

To participate in the interviews, media representatives must contact the newsroom at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston at 281-483-5111 by 1 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 17. B-roll of the butterflies in space and other recent station research will be broadcast beginning at 5:30 a.m.

The butterfly experiment, which included stunning Monarch and Painted Lady butterflies, is focused on stimulating science education across the country by studying the insects' development and behavior in microgravity. Hundreds of science teachers are participating with ground-based versions of the study and sharing the excitement with their students. The Monarchs were the first to be sent into space, while the Painted Ladies were the first to undergo a full metamorphosis from larva to pupa to adult while in orbit.

Other recent experiments on the station are making advances in the fight against food poisoning, testing new methods for delivering medicine to fight cancer cells, and investigating better materials for future spacecraft.

The NASA Live Interview Media Outlet channel will be used for the interviews. The channel is a digital satellite C-band downlink by uplink provider Americom. It is on satellite AMC 6, transponder 5C, located at 72 degrees west, downlink frequency 3785.5 Mhz based on a standard C-band 5150 Mhz L.O., vertical polarity, FEC is 3/4, data rate is 6.00 Mhz, symbol rate is 4.3404 Mbaud, transmission DVB, minimum Eb/N0 is 6.0 dB.

The interviews also will be broadcast live on NASA TV. For streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

For more information about the International Space Station, visit:

For more about scientific studies aboard the space station, visit: